


Surely As I Do

by ProneToRelapse



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Anxiety, Feelings, Fluff, Light Angst, M/M, Mild Gore, Non-Explicit Sex, Romance, Slice of Life, android repairs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 23:43:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15673662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProneToRelapse/pseuds/ProneToRelapse
Summary: Hank helps Connor learn to take better care of himself and learns some knew things along the way.





	Surely As I Do

"I'm too fucking old for this!" Hank yells at no one, skirting round the high fences of the old industrial site, trying to keep an eye on Connor who, as usual, has thrown himself after their suspect with no regard for his own safety or what it's doing to Hank's blood pressure. 

As if on cue, Connor flings himself across a wide gap in the scaffolding, hands catching a horizontal steel bar so he can swing onto the next row of wooden planks making up the tenuous walkway. Hank's heart thuds into overdrive against his ribs as he watches the android parkour his way across Detroit rooftops like some kind of acrobat.

The suspect scrambles through an open window and Connor follows him inside while Hank struggles to find a way in from outside the site. Eventually he finds the padlocked gate and steps back to shoot the chain loose before shoving through the gap and heading into the building. The ceiling is uncomfortably high and a lance of vertigo sends Hank staggering a little as he watches Connor jump from foothold to foothold. 

Hank's pulse skyrockets as Connor lunges for the suspect. He misses by a hair's breadth but recovers quickly, surging forward onto an old platform.

And that's where it all goes horribly,  _horrifically_ wrong.

The wood, rotted by water from rain dripping through the broken roof, crumbles under Connor's considerable weight and, almost as if in slow motion, Hank watches as Connor falls right through it, crashing into the ground with an almighty sound that echoes in Hank's ears.

Time speeds up again and Hank forces himself to move, skidding to his knees beside the ruined mess that is – oh God – Connor's body. His right leg has cracked, come away completely from the knee. His eyes are open but the left has fizzled out to black, the faint light of his white optical sensor pulsing erratically in the center. His right arm is partially cracked and it's more than Hank can take.

"Connor?  _Connor!_ Can you hear me? Don't you fucking dare be dead, do you hear me? Don't you  _fucking dare!"_ He wants to shake him, slap him awake, but he's so afraid to touch him. He thumbs his radio, all but bellowing their location into the receiver. "I've got an officer down, requesting immediate medical assistance!"

"I'm." Connor stutters, a tinny, digital version of his voice crackling from the back of his throat. His lips do not move. "CyberLife repair operator notified. Entering stasis suite and powering down all non-essential processes."

"Oh, thank  _fuck."_ Hank sags, a shaky hand reaching out to brush over one cracked cheek. "Jesus Christ, Connor. I was so fucking scared." His fingers come away slick with thirium. "I'm here, okay? I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."

Connor's LED whirs red twice, before powering down into the muted white of stasis.

-

Markus strides into the waiting area, catching Hank's attention and forcing him out of his seat in a panic. He's been staring at the same spot on the far wall for about a decade now, waiting for news. His nerves are shot to shit.

"He's alright," Markus says, laying a hand on Hank's shoulder. "He's repaired and he's about to be rebooted. I thought you'd want to be there."

"Yeah, I do. Thanks."

"It's no trouble." He leads Hank down a series of corridors into what looks like an operating theatre, except there's no op table in the center, just a wide platform flanked by mechanical arms that have Connor suspended between them. He's bare of his skin, covered only by a pair of white boxers, but completely repaired. Hank lets out a shaky sigh of relief.

"Any complications?"

"Not a one!" Chirps the technician from a console beside the platform. She throws Hank a cheery smile. "He's good to go. Shall I reboot him?"

"Please," Hank says, eyes fixed on Connor.

Connor's LED flares up first, straight into yellow then dissolving into blue just as his eyes slide open. They fix on Hank first and his entire body relaxes, skin slowly bleeding back into place.

"Hi," he murmurs softly. 

"I'm gonna kill you," Hank chokes round a smile. "I swear to god, one of these days I'm actually gonna kill you before you can do yourself some serious damage."

The mechanical arms lower Connor onto the platform base and he pitches forward into Hank's arms, hugging him tightly. "I'm sorry," he murmurs into Hank's chest. "I'm so sorry."

"I fucking love you, you asshole. Don't fucking scare me like that again."

Connor's arms tighten around him like he'll never let go.

-

Hank hasn't gotten this far on the force by not noticing stuff. He might not be on the same intellectual level as Connor's stupid mega robo-brain, but he's still pretty fucking observant. Which is exactly the reason he calls Markus while Connor's at his maintenance check up at CyberLife.

" _Lieutenant_ ," Markus says warmly when he answers. " _To what do I owe the pleasure?_ "

"I keep telling ya to call me Hank."

" _And I keep asking you to stop calling me 'android_ _jesus_ _'._ "

"… Alright, fair point. Anyway, uh... I’m looking for a favour.”

“ _If there’s anything I can do, please tell me._ ”

“Do you have… Any spare RK compatible parts you can sell me? And a copy of Connor’s operations manual or whatever the fuck his equivalent is?”

Markus is quiet for a long moment. “ _Might I ask why?_ ”

Hank closes his eyes and sighs, a long protracted breath. “Connor’s frightened of CyberLife. I think part of him is still convinced if he goes there he’ll get deactivated. Doesn’t help that the time we were there before you guys took it over, we were both nearly killed.”

“ _I’ll see what I can do_ ,” Markus says. “ _RK800 parts are incredibly sparse and, even with the blue prints, they’re costly to make._ ”

“Money isn’t an issue,” Hank says firmly. “Whatever it takes-“

“ _You misunderstand,_ ” Markus says, something like a smile in his voice. “ _I just mean they’ll have to be delivered with slightly more security than a usual postal delivery. So they might not be easy to get to you discreetly._ ”

Hank snorts. “How’d you know I wanted to keep this on the down low?”

“ _Because you_ _called me while Connor is indisposed._ _I might not be a detective, but you aren’t a particularly hard man to read when you care about someone._ ”

Hank allows himself a small, somewhat fond smile. He’s glad, after everything, to have Markus as a friend. Who’d‘ve thought the day would come when Hank was asking androids for favours? Not him, that’s for damn sure. A year ago he’d’ve laughed in whoever’s face for suggesting it, then body checked them for good measure when walking away. Now… Yeah, there’s pretty much nothing he wouldn’t do for Connor. Or any of the Jericho crew for that matter. 

“ _Ah_ ,” Markus says, drawing Hank back from his existential musings. “ _North says if you can leave her a key to your home and make sure you and Connor are absent from the place on the sixteenth, she and Simon will deliver the parts themselves and store them in your garage_.”

“Tell North she’s a fuckin’ star, yeah?”

“ _She says “fuck you, old man”._ ”

“Oh, stop, you’re gonna make me blush.”

-

Hank doesn’t really dwell on the high-value components filling his garage now. Thing was hardly ever used before, his car is perfectly fine to stay out on the driveway. The only thing in there are a few trash bags of shit he’s never gotten round to tossing and a couple of boxes of Cole’s things and old photographs that Hank still can’t bring himself to look at. Connor never has a reason to go in there, doesn’t seem like he has any plans to, so the huge crates stamped with the CyberLife logo are safe and secret for the time being. 

True to his word, Markus emails Hank the entirety of Connor’s unique operations manual. It’s a huge file that takes almost five minutes to open on Hank’s outdated tablet and written without standard consumers in mind. Connor, after all, was never intended to be a commercially sold model. He’s specialised, one-of-a-kind and state-of-the-art. A prototype, and the manual states as much. It contains nothing about his personality or cosmetic functions, only lists his abilities, processes, system capabilities. It states his in-depth programming, his battery life, his weaknesses and his strengths. Everything is so clinical, intended for the people who invested in his production, and whoever at the DPD needed to know his specs before he was assigned to the deviancy case. 

It’s cold and Hank hates it, but he reads it anyway, beginning to end, over and over and over again until he knows, in theory, that he could probably take Connor apart and put him back together again. 

Not that he’d ever want to, but it’s a comfort to know that they can completely eliminate the need for Connor to ever return to CyberLife. 

Hank familiarises himself with the spare parts while Connor takes Sumo for his evening walk, takes a leg and an arm out of the protective casings and looks them over under the guidance of the manual. It doesn’t make him nearly as uncomfortable as he’d thought it would, seeing the parts that Connor can replace to be made whole again. How is it any different from the high-tech prosthetics humans need? Or splinting a broken limb with cybernetic augmentations when the bone is too damaged to heal properly? In the end, it really isn’t that dissimilar. Just because Connor can endure functionally longer than Hank doesn’t make him less deserving of repair. And one shot to his head, destroying his memory core, is all that’s needed to kill him for good. 

Hank replaces the parts and tries not to think too far down that road. 

-

Hank’s newfound knowledge of the RK series comes in handy a lot sooner than he would like. He was hoping he wouldn’t have to bust out the knowhow until Connor’s next maintenance cycle but, as usual, the android just can’t stop himself from throwing himself headfirst into danger the second it rears its head. 

It’s not particularly Connor’s  _fault_ that they’re nowdown a vital suspect, or back to square one without any new leads, nor is it Connor’s fault that Hank’s just a little bit too trigger happy when Connor’s safety is involved. It  _is_  Connor’s fault, however, that the suspect manages to kick him off a fire escape because the damn kid doesn’t consider failure an option and leapt up after him instead of letting him go and relying on Hank to actually do his damn job and offer back up even though he’s damn experienced and can actually hold his own in a chase, thank you very much. 

Which is how they end up with a dead suspect and Connor with his shin snapped clean in half. 

“No case,” Hank spits through gritted teeth as he supports Connor’s weight and leads him back to the car, “is worth your damn life. One of these days you’re gonna get so badly injured that you won’t come back. What the fuck am I meant to do then? All that fucking preconstruction software and you couldn’t stop to try a different route?”

“I  _did,_ ” Connor defends, wincing as Hank helps him into the passenger seat, jostling his injured leg. “I took the one that had the highest probability of success.”

“You didn’t think I could’ve helped by heading him off down the other end of the alley?”

“I… didn’t factor that in to the equation.”

“I  _know_ you didn’t _,_ Connor, that’s the fucking point. We’re  _partners._ We work these cases  _together._ Do you think I hold you back, is that it?”

“No, I-“

“Am I too slow? A dead weight? Not a fancy android who can run up to sixty-five kilometres an hour so I’m no good to you?” Hank slams his door shut harder than necessary. Connor is injured, he shouldn’t be this angry, but it  _hurts._ He’snot useless and it stings because, yeah, he fucking feels like he is but damn it Connor thinking that too is a knife twisting in his gut. 

“Hank,  _no,_ I-“

“Then what is it? Don’t trust the washed up old cop to watch your back?”

“ _I’m terrified of losing you!”_

The unexpected outburst is louder than a gunshot in the confines of the car, effectively silencing and quelling all of Hank’s wrongly placed anger. He sits, hands tight and white-knuckled on the steering wheel while Connor stares out the windshield, LED flashing  _red red red_ in the reflection of the passenger side window. He’s tense, so still he’s not even breathing, but small tremors shiver through his hands where they’re clenched in his lap. 

“I know you’re capable,” Connor murmurs at the dashboard. “I’m perfectly aware of everything you can and can’t do, possibly more so than you are yourself. I know your blood sugar levels, your resting heart rate, your average sprinting speed, your endurance levels, your lung capacity. I know all of it, Hank. But you’re so  _fragile._ You get shot, stabbed, hit too hard in the head, lose too much blood and that’s it. And I can’t… I can’t deal with that. I can’t deal with the emotions that causes. They  _hurt._ If I get injured, bar anything happening to my memory core, I get shipped off to CyberLife and returned good as new. You… You don’t get that guarantee. I have a fucking  _warranty_ , Hank.”

Finally he turns to look at Hank and his doe eyes are misty and pained. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”

“Yeah,” Hank says hoarsely. “Me neither.”

They drive home in silence. What is there to say? Hank can’t guarantee he’s gonna die of old age. A perp with too much adrenaline and too little sense could take him out tomorrow. He could die of hundreds of inconsequential things at any time. That’s what it is to be human. Finite time. Hank’s had fifty-four years to come to terms with that. Connor’s had a little under a year and he’s still struggling. But what can Hank do other than take care and choke down the rabbit food Connor keeps packing into his fridge? He’s not gonna stop doing his job and Connor would never ask. 

All they can do is take pleasure in the time they do have. Even if it does one day get cut short. 

It’s not like Hank can get his consciousness uploaded into an android body or whatever the fuck else. That would be crazy. He’s not sure that’s even in the realm of possible. 

“Look,” Hank says, yanking up the handbrake once they’re parked outside the house. He turns in his seat to face Connor who looks at him out the corner of his eyes. “Only way we’re gonna stay together for as long as we can is if we work together, alright? Let me have your back out in the field, and promise to have mine. Okay? Because I get it. Losing you scares me, too, Con. Jesus, you don’t even know how much it scares me. Or maybe you do, and I get it. But fuck, for the first time in for-fucking-ever, I wanna stick around. I wanna wake up to your goofy face for as many days as I can. That okay with you?”

Connor makes an odd choking noice. “It’s not goofy,” he says quietly, smiling even as his eyes fill again. “You like my face.”

“No,” Hank says. “I  _love_  your face. And it’s still goofy.” He gets out and opens Connor’s door for him, crouching down so Connor can get an arm round his shoulders and hop along with him to the door. 

“I’ll contact Markus,” Connor says as Hank sets him down on the sofa, wiping thirium off on his jeans. Sumo sniffs at his broken leg and whines, resting his head on Connor’s uninjured thigh for pets. “I’m not sure when they’ll be able to fit me in.”

“Hold of on that for a minute,” Hank says, heading for the garage door. “Just take a breather. We’ll sort it out in a bit.”

Connor agrees tiredly, scratching absently at Sumo’s ears while Hank slips into the garage for a replacement left leg and a pouch of thirium. Connor isn’t paying him any attention, focused on feeling sorry for himself and fussing the dog when Hank heads back in, only looking up when Hank kneels down and rolls his sleeves up, shooing Sumo off to his bed. 

“What—“

“Shh,” Hank tells him, rolling Connor’s pant leg up past his knee. The synthskin has drawn away, mottled and scratched, from the main site of the crack. It’s a gruesome wound, plastic jagged and cracked, the deep blue of Connor’s internal workings flickering erratically. “Have you sectioned off the thirium flow?”

“Y…Ye-es,” Connor says, drawn out and confused, brows pinched together. “Hank, what-“

“Shh, I’m concentrating.” Pressing lightly, Hank touches his fingertips to spots either side of Connor’s knee, just beside the bend of the joint. His skin slowly bleeds away up to mid-thigh and the panels give a soft click as they loosen until Hank can remove the damaged leg. Connor’s hands have a vice grip on the couch cushions as he watches, chest still as he holds his breath and watches. Hank moves slowly, radiating calm as he tosses the broken leg away and replaces it with the new one, locking it into place with confident, sure hands. He leans back and the skin slowly ripples back into place. He gives Connor’s bare shin a kiss for good measure before rolling the pant leg back down. 

“Here,” he says, jabbing a straw into the thirium pack like a glorified Capri Sun. “Drink that and wait ten minutes—“

“—Before reconnecting the new limb to my thirium flow circuit,” Connor finishes, eyes wide. “How—  _Where—“_

“I don’t like it at CyberLife tower either,” Hank says, gently prising Connor’s right hand from the couch cushion and pressing the thirium pack into it. “Look, I got you a straw and everything.”

Connor is still staring at him. “You learned,” he says, voice faint. “You learned about me so you could—“

“So I could help,” Hank cuts him off. “I learned how to repair you. So I could, somehow, keep my stupid android boyfriend safe when he hurts his dumb ass self throwing himself across the Detroit skyline. Because I quite like him and want to keep him around for as long as I can.” He pushes Connor’s hand towards his mouth, making him jab himself in the top lip with the end of the straw poking out of the pouch. “Less freaking out, more thirium drinking.”

“I love you,” Connor says round the straw. 

“Yeah, I love you, too, baby. Now scoot over. I’m old and my knees can’t take kneeling on the floor for that long. Netflix?”

-

Connor is, slightly, more careful after that. If anything, it makes working together so much more easier now that he’s relying more on Hank than actively trying to keep him away from the thick of it, so to speak. Hank might be pushing fifty-five, but he can still tackle a perp with the best of them. Which Connor is rather appreciative of if the slightly flushed look on his face is anything to go by when he sees Hank body slam a runner twice his muscle mass and cuff him in one smooth movement. They keep injuries to a minimum as best they can and, in return, Hank complains less and less when everything in the cupboards goes down in sodium content by more than half the current measure. 

Which leaves repairs to be done only when Connor’s maintenance cycle pops up on the calendar. It becomes part of their routine easily, and somehow serves to bring them even closer together. 

Hank shouldn’t be surprised. It’s actually an incredibly intimate thing to do, changing over the necessary parts while Connor sits there bare of his skin, eyes heavy-lidded as Hank caresses his wires in between locking replacement components into place. Mostly it goes by without a hitch; Hank works efficiently and steadily and Connor trusts him implicitly to do so. But some things are harder for Connor to allow than others. 

Hank would’ve assumed the thirium pump to be Connor’s most heavily guarded component. In essence it’s the heart of him, so Hank was surprised when Connor eagerly tore the thing out of his chest and brought Hank’s fingers up to the thirium-soaked hole, arching with a wanton moan as he slipped two fingers inside. 

That session ended a bit messily, with thririum stains on the carpet, down Hank’s fingers, up his arms and, to his eternal embarrassment, round his mouth. The androids at the precinct tittered and whispered among themselves when Hank came into the precinct the next day, but Connor swelled with something like pride. Damn closeted exhibitionist. 

No, the most delicate component that Connor is terrified of replacing are his eyes. He’s pushed them already way past their guaranteed expectancy, and Hank has noticed the way Connor’s vision has started to flicker out of focus at crime scenes, the frustration as his scanners refuse to cooperate as they should. But when Hank brings the replacement eyes into the bedroom, Connor shies away, babbling that his eyes are working fine, that he doesn’t need replacements. His optical sensors are prototypes after all and very delicate and perhaps they should just leave them be for the time being. 

“Connor,” Hank murmurs, cupping his face gently, turning him by the cheek to look at him. “I’ll always keep you safe. You need new eyes. Let me help you.”

An hour and countless soft, cajoling words later, Hank is sitting cross legged on the bed opposite Connor, the lights dimmed as low as possible, the android’s hands clutching tightly at his knees. Slowly, achingly so, Hank brushes his thumbs over Connor’s lowered eyelids, humming a soft song under his breath as the skin recedes and he can press at the panels on Connor’s temples to unlock the optical components. Connor’s fingers dig uncomfortably into his knees but he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t falter, just keeps humming that sweet little song as he carefully slips one component free and then the other. 

Connor shudders with a panicked sound and Hank quietens him with gentle, slow touches to his jaw and neck. It’s disconcerting, looking into the dark hollows in Connor’s face where his warm eyes should be, but Hank won’t replace the new optics until Connor has calmed, which he does eventually under Hank’s reassuring caress. 

Hank clicks the new components in with the exact amount of pressure needed and no more, stroking his fingers through the soft hair at Connor’s temples and rubbing the pads of his thumbs over the rides of Connor’s eyebrows. The skin swarms back over his face faster than usual and there’s a series of quiet, muted whites and beeps before Connor’s eyelids flutter and open and those deep cocoa eyes are glinting back at Hank’s smiling face. 

“Hi there,” Hank says, lifting one of Connor’s hands to his lips to kiss. “Welcome back, baby. You good?”

He finds himself immediately with an arm and lapful of exuberant android, warm and soft synthetic lips kissing all over his face and beard, nuzzling as close as he can into Hank’s skin. Connor’s face is wet with tears of gratitude, overwhelmed by tenderness he’d never known before Hank, and when he feels vulnerable Hank is the first one he turns to, usually desperate for some physical sort of reassurance. 

And Hank gives it easily, eagerly, meeting frantic hands with steady, guiding movements, stroking his palms across overheated skin. Always so slow and careful in these moments where Connor may as well have his entire chest cavity open to bare his pump and his synthetic heart to Hank, seeking desperately to be handled with care. Hank has held Connor’s very heart in his hands, he knows what it is to feel this vulnerable and exposed. With this very man, shaking apart in his arms as Hank presses into his body first fingers then the rest, Hank knows what it is to lower his defences and let the world back in. 

Except now his world has narrowed down to pale skin and depthless brown eyes, to the steady blink of an LED and the double quick thrum of thirium against his skin. 

“Hank,” Connor breathes, voice hitching with emotions he can’t handle as he rocks and writhes in Hank’s lap. 

“Connor,” Hank answers, guiding him through it, as always, with patience and love while he sinks deeper, skin slick and eyes bright. 

They lie together afterwards and Hank feels it deep in his bones, the sense of rightness that fills everything they are, do, and have. He’d thought he’d be slow to love again, hesitant, even unwilling. He hadn’t expected to throw himself so wholeheartedly into affection again. 

“I…” Connor says, fingers twined tightly with Hank’s as they lie on their sides facing each other, blue blush matching red. 

“Yeah,” Hank says, smiling. “Me too.”

 

 


End file.
